Month: January 2016

Virtually all local history material is of value to genealogists and historians. Only in the past year or two, however, have the large genealogy companies (ancestry.com, for example) hit on the quantity and quality of genealogical and historical material contained in high school and college yearbooks and annuals. And, they have begun to offer copies of some of these on their websites.

We’re happy to say that we were more than a decade ahead of the giants in recognizing the importance of yearbooks and in beginning their re-publication here at Between the Lakes Group.

Because of all the recent attention directed to yearbooks, we decided to list all of the yearbooks available from us, in the order of the year the yearbook was originally published, all on a single page. There you’ll also find links to the location on our site you can find more information about them. You can see that list on our Yearbooks page — just CLICK HERE to review it.

We’ll have a few posts on the subject of yearbooks — particularly high school yearbooks — and how you can use them. For what? Well, for starters, to fill out the lives of people you may be researching, to learn more about the communities you’re interested in, and even to establish an elusive connection to a family member. Those posts will come as we write them in the next few days and weeks, so check back here for them.

The occasion that really prompted this page was our republication of the Port Jervis, NY High School yearbook for 1938, “Senior Memoirs”. A pretty hefty yearbook (as they go) at 138 pages, with a few rarities in it (such as senior horoscopes to supplement the more standard Last Will and Testament section, and, hearkening back to yearbooks of two or three decades earlier, prize stories and poems), it is one of several Port Jervis High School yearbooks that we have republished. It can be found on our Orange County, NY page.

(You’ll also see there the very first appearance of our snappy new “buy now” button!)